Bus Poems
The man behind me
Back bent, cramped, feet on
seat in front, so slouched it hurts:
an inverted frog.
THESE SEATS ARE PARTICULARLY
APPRECIATED BY THE ELDERLY
AND THE INFIRM
The other seats were filled today
so I sat behind the screen
behind the driver, though
the view was poor.
The old man I’d been talking to
sat with me for a distance,
so I didn’t feel too bad.
‘Does this bus go past Lidl’s?’
asked a child-voice behind me.
Even the second L of Lidl was a vowel,
just like a toddler (or a Londoner).
Where the old man had been, a small pink
umbrella handle hung over my seat.
‘Does this bus go past Lidl’s?’
This time I turned, and saw
the speaker was a mother.
The umbrella was for her child
of pushchair age. And I
realised that though many
mothers were yet younger,
I had ten years on her.
But still I don’t appreciate the seat.
Tag
The children outside the school
exhaust themselves
chasing about in circles
on pointless quests.
And they don’t even get paid.
Terrace
My house is not your house:
your house is mauve and mine is yellow.
Number seven’s doors and sills are blue.
Number nine has its window boxes.
My house is not your house:
your house is mauve and mine is fiercely yellow.
Parkland Drive, Exeter
An arch of brick and mortar,
an arch for a little window.
But on this house, and that, and that,
there is no glass. Brick supports brick,
brick takes the weight from brick.
Window lets light through,
window lets wind though,
brick, unless airbrick, does not.
An arch of brick and mortar,
an arch for a little brick window.
Evidently they don’t want to see me.
Smokescreen
Two women walk up the hill to the hospital
bundled in coats against the winter.
They could be mother and daughter.
The white-haired one, though shorter,
carries herself upright, faces her climb.
The taller hunches at the trudge;
her face draws on a cheerless cigarette.
And I am so brainwashed
that I write a poem.
Democracy
Vote red! Vote blue!
Vote puce for all I care.
So long as there are elections.
Or when would the roads be paved?
Ankara
Silly trains! You’re not
supposed to hit:
that’s what the rails are for.
Roundabout
On each approach to the roundabout
there is a road island.
On each road island,
and on the roundabout itself, in all directions,
there is a plastic bollard, yellow and white.
On each bollard is emblazoned on azure
an argent arrow in bend sinister
proclaiming north and south and east and west
‘drive to the left of me.’
Every bollard is crumpled.
These poems were all started in my head on the bus on the way to work, most of them during my first week there when the sights on the route were still new to me. I wrote the poems or at least jotted down notes for them when I reached my place of work before it was time to start. All were inspired by things observed in or from the bus, except ‘Ankara’, which was a response to a news report I saw just before going out.
There is a common technique behind all these (except ‘Democracy’): what I have been calling the verbal snapshot. Because my visual memory is so poor, I generally find that I forget things I might use in writing before I get the chance to do anything with them. The trick is to capture my immediate impressions in a short phrase I can remember: often though to form the core of the poem, though maybe not itself enough for a short story.